PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

treaties, or when Mr. Hughes investigated the life insurance
companies, or when somebody's scandal exudes from the pages of Town
Topics to the front pages of Mr. Hearst's newspapers.
Whether the reasons for privacy are good or bad, the barriers exist.
Privacy is insisted upon at all kinds of places in the area of what is
called public affairs. It is often very illuminating, therefore, to
ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion.
Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which
you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told
him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted
to see? When he informs you that France thinks this and that, what
part of France did he watch? How was he able to watch it? Where was he
when he watched it? What Frenchmen was he permitted to talk to, what
newspapers did he read, and where did they learn what they say? You
can ask yourself these questions, but you can rarely answer them. They
will remind you, however, of the distance which often separates your
public opinion from the event with which it deals. And the reminder is
itself a protection.
CHAPTER III
CONTACT AND OPPORTUNITY
1
While censorship and privacy intercept much information at its source,
a very much larger body of fact never reaches the whole public at all,
or only very slowly. For there are very distinct limits upon the
circulation of ideas.
A rough estimate of the effort it takes to reach "everybody" can be
had by considering the Government's propaganda during the war.
Remembering that the war had run over two years and a half before
America entered it, that millions upon millions of printed pages had
been circulated and untold speeches had been delivered, let us turn to
Mr. Creel's account of his fight "for the minds of men, for the
conquest of their convictions" in order that "the gospel of
Americanism might be carried to every corner of the globe."
[Footnote: George Creel, _How We Advertised America._]
Mr. Creel had to assemble machinery which included a Division of News
that issued, he tells us, more than six thousand releases, had to
enlist seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men who delivered at least
seven hundred and fifty-five thousand, one hundred and ninety speeches